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Check out our partner site, Dragonfly.eco, which offers an Eco-Writers' Space, the Dragonfly Library, and other literary resources for nature lovers. Dragonfly is an online environmental storytelling portal, which writers, scholars, publishers, and readers may freely use as reference or as a way to share their work. Our motto is "blowing your mind with wild words and worlds."

Artists and Climate Change, an initiative of The Arctic Cycle, is rerunning our Spotlight on Climate Change Authors as a new Wild Authors series.

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The Completionist, Siobhan Adcock

One of the reasons climate change is so hard to even think about – let alone understand fully – is that it manifests in many different ways. We’re seeing some of those manifestations now in the form of wildfires ravaging the Pacific Northwest, larger and more frequent hurricanes, and rapidly melting polar ice. In Siobhan Adcock’s latest novel, The Completionist, climate change has led to even more catastrophic events: world war and a global fertility crisis.

Find her. You need to keep looking, no matter what. I'm afraid of what might’ve happened to her. You be afraid too.

A young Marine, Carter Quinn, comes home from war to his fractured family, in a near-future America in which water is artificially engineered and technology is startlingly embedded in people’s everyday lives. At the same time, a fertility crisis has terrifying implications for women, including Carter’s two beloved sisters, Fred and Gardner. Fred, accomplished but impetuous, the eldest sibling, is naturally pregnant—a rare and miraculous event that puts her independence in jeopardy. And Gardner, the idealistic younger sister who lived for her job as a Nurse Completionist, has mysteriously vanished, after months of disturbing behaviour.

Carter’s efforts to find Gard (and stay on Fred’s good side) keep leading him back home to their father, a veteran of a decades-long war just like Carter himself, who may be concealing a painful truth that could save or condemn them all.

Selected Interviews

Quotes

The so-called realist novel, because of its debt to the Enlightenment, has shied away from engaging with Nature and issues involving large collectives, and focused instead on what John Updike calls an “individual moral adventure”. This focus, Amitav Ghosh points out in his seminal work on climate change – The Great Derangement – has ghettoised all other kinds of writing, placing them in genre fiction. -Rajat Chaudhuri